Obsidian Butterfly

I am the wound that does not heal, the small solar stone: 
strike me, and the world will go up in flames.

Had I not stolen that book, I most likely would not have been a writer. It was a collection of Latin American and European authors edited by two former poet laureates—in which I cannot recall the name of neither the text nor the laureates. All I remember are the authors: there was Czeslaw Milosz, Nicanor Parra, Carlos Drummond De Andrade, Julio Cortázar, Fernando Pessoa, and a handful of others. At the exact halfway point of this text, along the meridian of page and language, is where I found it.

I remember serving witness to the shattering of the sun; time began its laughter through the only open window in the room, and if you looked at the clock long enough, a hand would come out of the book and point you in the direction of an obsidian butterfly perched on the end of winter. That’s exactly what it was—an obsidian butterfly. Who the fuck would have ever thought that a butterfly would come into the hood? I was understanding the words, but I wasn’t understanding this language. What I’m reading looks a lot like prose, and what I’m reading sounds a lot like poetry, but in essence this work is neither: its existence within a binary’s twilight allowed it to become a form of its own. This very form of curated chaos was the prose poem—revealed to me within the lines of Octavio Paz’s “Obsidian Butterfly.”

Each night is an eyelid the thorns never stop piercing.

And I never really understood the fear of chaos. Nor the fear of depravity. I never really understood this denial of allowing yourself to see the beautiful behind the perceived foundless and ballistic. Chaos doesn’t possess a nature; it’s intrinsically formless. And if it’s intrinsically formless, it’s capable of becoming all forms. What “Obsidian Butterfly” revealed to me, as I sit here reading it for the first time, is that we’re the exact same. It’s a failure of judgement and absolute lapse of belief to predestine the nature of another human being, for by doing so we have robbed them the opportunity of allowing them to show the world all of their forms. If anything, this work didn’t just impact me in regards to language and imagery; it had holistically reinvented my philosophies of being. It offered an almost indirect olive branch to all of the worries that I could have talked about with only myself.

And now my hands tremble, the words are caught in my throat. Give me a chair and a little sun.

What are your greatest fears? I promise you, no one else is listening. Have a conversation with me by having a conversation with yourself. Are you afraid of economic collapse? A stray bullet? Rusted nails in the floorboards? Your childhood home engulfed in flames? Are you afraid of looking into the mirror and believing that you’re capable of forgiveness? The doors are locked. The blinds are lowered. This conversation is only between us. You don’t need to answer right now, if you still need the time. Or if you just simply don’t want to. I’m only asking you because that’s what I ask myself—and I would like to believe that I’m not the only one here who’s a mausoleum of fears. I would like to believe that I’m not the only one here who has ever had to rehearse a response. The scriptures professed this world a stage. Humanity its players. How will we know when to recite our most important lines if the entire story has been an improvisation?

I would never ask you a question that I wouldn’t answer myself first—and so I’ll tell you that one of my life’s greatest fears has been the premature degeneration of my brain. I grew up intimately alongside the Parkinson’s of my maternal grandmother, knowing full well that the preceding generations of our family would be bound to become the inheritors and expressors of its coding. From childhood into adolescence, and shortly past the cusp of adulthood, I witnessed a library of faces and names just wear away, slowly smoldering into this leftover archive of barely-legible pages. There was no recognition of her children’s faces; she kept hearing the voice of a child outside the house screaming to be let in; she kept having conversations with her oldest sister who had long been deceased; she would scream the names of people no longer present, all while struggling to remember those of the ones who still were. The only people she could immediately recognize at the end of her life were her husband and her second-youngest grandchild. The only people she could immediately recognize at the end of her 88 years were Abuelito and me. And I’m not going to lie—this entire essay is beyond fucking difficult to write. But it’s alright. It’s still only the two of us.

I was the flint that rips the storm clouds of night and opens the doors of the showers. I don’t know the trajectory that my life would have taken had I not stolen this book.

What’s the significance of “Obsidian Butterfly”? What’s the significance of the prose poem? What’s the significance of my grandmother’s life? Or the mathematics of fear? They all taught me how to find the beautiful in the chaotic. My grandmother was my mind’s closest mirror—she was one of its prime architects. And what “Obsidian Butterfly” did for me, as the first prose poem I have ever read, is that it finally allowed me to unhinge all of the hesitancies and regulators that I had cast within myself in regards to the thoughts, feelings, images, and sounds that I navigated since childhood but could never fully express through my writing, regardless of ability.

What we call craft and form is inevitably bound to find endless iterations of themselves upon contact with another writer’s hand, but as a basic framework: the prose poem is written without line breaks, following a paragraph format, free-flowing and evocative in symbolic, metaphorical language absent of any set rhyme or meter. If we were to compare it with a fiction prose approach, the prose poem tends to incorporate lesser presence of plot, characters, rising/falling action, and the essence of a piece can be condensed rather nebulously within one or two paragraphs, whereas with fiction there might be more of an underlying pressure/expectation to keep world-building and expounding on details of a place, person, or event beyond the bounds where the prose poem began and ended. The poet Charles Simic once wrote of this craft: “This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle.” The second paragraph of Paz’s prose poem “A Walk at Night” lends testament to this alchemist’s experiment, beginning with “Around the corner, the Apparitions: the girl who turns into a pile of withered leaves if you touch her; the stranger who pulls off his mask and is faceless…” continuing into images of “the ballerina who spins on the point of a scream; the who’s there?, the who are you?, the where am I?” and further apparitions being described as a “great tower destroyed by an inconclusive thought, open to the sky like a poem split in two…” all within the span of six lines. You see that what we’ve entered is not simply the world of prose—and for me it’s enrapturing. Now were we to compare this with Paz’s book-length essay on Mexican identity, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” the work being just as laden with symbolism and metaphorical language (if not far more), you’d still be able to distinguish the realm of prose poem from the realm of a very poetic, analytical essay. I’m focusing on Paz in this piece because he’s That Guy, but practices of prose poetry can be seen from the Beat Poets to Baudelaire to 17th-18th century Japanese writing to the ‘automatic writing’ of the Surrealists who utilized it as means for establishing stronger relationships with the unconscious and its dreamlike imagery. If we sit with our uncertainty long enough, the inexplicable starts making sense.

You should see all of the butterfly wings I keep coughing up when I talk about survival.